Crisis: Way too Early review

NOTE: Crisis is a game made by a hippy in Southeast Malasia. Thus it's not surprising that you've never heard of it. It definitely has nothing to do with Crysis. It would not make sense for me to be playing the game "Crysis", even though it may or may not be on some piracy sites already.

So not much has changed from the Crisis demo; you still jump out of a plane with a less than adequate introduction and really choppy framerates. I was running the game in DirectX 9 on low settings until NVidia has the good sense to write some real drivers. After the well-known demo, you head further and further into lonely-ville as more and more of your squadmates are killed off by the annoying blue ice alien thing.

I had a lot of fun tossing barrels and broken pieces of buildings at enemies in the demo level using Ultimate Strength, but soon enough the game starts to discourage this. First off, there are exactly one million freaking south koreans (no, not North Koreans, you're thinking of Crysis, and I am definitely not talking about Crysis.) and often you'll be fighting them at a really long range. Furthermore, there will be TWO million South Koreans if you have the sheer lunacy to get seen by someone and let them set off a flare.

Furthermore, there are one too many vehicles than one would like in a Long Cry-esque game. Soon enough you will be pitted against a tank without any helping hints as to how the fuck you're supposed to destroy it. One of them I managed to lure near a gas station, then tear a hole in both its hull and the lurking ozone later. The other, which thankfully seemed to have its turret stuck in a hole in the wall, I left alone for some 15 minutes before finally finding a stack of missile launchers. I used about two launchers (amounting to 6 rockets) before the thing blew up. This sort of brings up the question, what the hell would I do if I had missed with some of these, or blown up the gas station early? I'm not sure if Critek has completely thought that one through.

This extends to helicopters as well. In one section I was using Speed to go down this very long river to an extraction point. I would be using a boat, but unlike boats, my FiberSuit doesn't blow into a million pieces when a bullet larger than a splinter hits it. I kept feeling like the game was supposed to give me something to take these things down, but I ended up putting up with the thing the whole 2 miles or so. Afterwards, the impending boss battle felt comparatively easy.

Let me make this clear; if recent FPS's have felt easy for you, take a look at Crisis. You're going to have enemies all around you and not much cover. In my opinion, Kojima should have given up the tagline "No place to hide" to Critek. You'll need to use the suit abilities to survive, but beyond that you'll need to have some damn good aim, and as hard as it is, a damn good framerate.